The launch of Microsoft’s new interoperability principles have been both cautiously welcomed and sceptically scrutinised as the company goes about convincing the IT industry that it is genuine in its pursuit to provide interoperability with rival products, more consumer choice, less vendor lock-in and greater collaboration with the open source community.
Here, Microsoft Australia CTO Greg Stones gives some obviously polished PR-approved responses to questions from Computerworld regarding the motivations behind support for ODF and PDF, what the software giant is really gaining by providing support to rival formats, and the ambiguities in its Open Specification Promise. He also gives a painfully polished response to CNN’s senior editor’s claims that the company is trying to eliminate free software.Typical Microsoft PR response to tough questions, but interesting nonetheless….
Microsoft Responds to Interoperability Concerns
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Adam Scheinberg
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I tried to open the first link on the article…. http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/default.mspx
using Firefox3. A stock Firefox3, no alterations have been made to the codepages or the fonts, and this Microsoft page was totally unreadable. Well, not totally, but the fonts were too small and ill-defined. In fact, plain ugly. So much so that I closed the page
Of course, I could have messed around with my fonts so that I might end up with something that wont destroy my eyes, but then the onus is on me to go out of my way….
If Microsoft are being truthful about being interoperable, should they not put their money where their mouth is and display a site that we can ALL look at !
Edited 2008-06-18 15:36 UTC
Actually the whole page corrupted thing has been happening to alot of people on firefox 3. refresh a few times, and eventually it will render properly
this is what it looks like from my machine on ff3
http://s3.photobucket.com/albums/y92/googleninja/?action=view&curre…
You picture looked pretty small, thats one of the limitations with photobucket, and I see you are using XP.
I was using Firefox3 under Linux… one of the major targets for Microsoft’s interoperability programme I should think, yet it looks horrible to me.
here is what it looks like to me
http://www.freewebs.com/raver31/screenie.jpg
A quick peek at the css shows us that the font-family is set to Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif. Verdana is very readable at smaller sizes, arial and helvetica are ok, but it look like you are defaulting to your systems sans-serif, which is probably bitstream something or other with anti-aliasing not played with.
If you want the web to look right, do yourself a favor and install the ms core fonts. If you dont want to do that, at least set your system defaults to something better then what its at now.
You prove my point exactly. I was using a default Firefox install on a Suse Linux system. Normally there is no problem on websites, but yet, you think I need to add/change fonts on my machine just so that I can look at it the same way someone else can on a different setup ?
This is another example of Microsoft and standards, and another example of someone not blaming Microsoft, but assuming the problem was caused by HOW they used the computer…..
Verdana is an MS font, but Arial and Helvetica are both industry standards. If none are on your machine, it defaults out to however sans-serif is configured on your machine.
A) Suse should include Arial and/or Helvetica, as they are required for any remotely serious work in anything even related to type.
B) Suse should configure its system to use a sans-serif font that doesn’t look like complete and total garbage something in between point sizes
The full css rules for the text is
font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
font-size:70%;
line-height:140%;
margin:0px;
padding:0px 0px 1em;
That is very standard stuff, and should both look nice and be readable on any os set up even remotely well. The worst thing you can say is that they put verdana as the first choice on the list, but I don’t think that is really worth complaining about.
The reason it looks like ass on your computer is freetype and/or your sans-serif font is dying painfully trying to rendor in between points (as it is set to 70% rather then a specific size) I don’t think MS should have to take this into account, it is like complaining that a website sucks because you have a hard time using it as your browser doesn’t support images, or javascript, or css.
Edited 2008-06-18 22:19 UTC
I can see what the guy is talking about, the site looks like pants on this setup too, it is Vectorlinux running on Firefox 2.
Can you not see his point ? Should I also have to change my default font setup just to accommodate Microsoft, or any other website that assumes they can dictate how I view webpages ?
It looks to me like some muppet designed a webpage in MSWord and saved it to web.
Any OS that does not ship with Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, and Courier automatically fails as a desktop machine. These are not microsoft fonts, they are standards that are used everywhere, and not just for computers. MS should not have to test against the hundreds of alternative operating systems that do not meet the minimum requirements of displaying text.
If it didn’t look right without verdana, you would have a point. What you are seeing is a combination of freetypes collosal failure on anything but the simplest of tasks, and the lack of standard fonts on linux.
I’ll repeat it again, because even though i thought I was clear in my last post, aparently I wasn’t. The only non standard part of the styling of that text is putting verdana as the first choice. There is nothing else microsoft specific, and a system/browser combination that cannot support is not suitable even for viewing office memos, let alone the thousands of permutations that it will run into on the web.
It doesn’t fail. We’re free to use whatever fonts we desire. It’s been said time and time again that *other* regular websites would render just fine and it’s Microsoft’s site that doesn’t want to be rendered properly.
You CAN use whatever font you want. If you DO use a font that completely FAILS when set to 70% as about to say, 8pt, that is not a failure of microsofts, it is a failure of whatever OS you are using. Saying “just use the pt system” is NOT an excuse. Just because other sites you happen to visit use pt does not make MS the bad guy
Lets flip this around, IE6 makes a dogs breakfast out of CSS rendoring. Does that mean that anyone making a css compliant site doesn’t care about standards because IE6 is woefully inadequate? Same deal here. There is nothing that is not standards compliant on that page, it is the fault of the OS, not that markup that is the problem.
Edited 2008-06-19 13:55 UTC
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/06/18/openoffice-org-voice-odf-fud/
<Eruaran> Currently if you attempt to open a .odt document for example in Microsoft Word, you get assailed by dialogues that say the document is corrupted, asks you if you want to ^aEUR~fix^aEURTM it, and it insinuates you shouldn^aEURTMt trust it or the source it came from.
Until I see people with microsoft.com addresses on the Samba, Open Office and other project mailing lists, with code submitted from microsoft.com addresses, and I see a commitment from Microsoft to using LDAP schemas that are standard outside of the Active Directory world, and password hash formats that are standard outside of the AD and Windows worlds, and actually communicating with people – all this is just fire and motion, as Joel Spolsky says.
It’s sad that they’re going around trying to get people to buy this, and it’s really sad that they still think they can answer these questions with ridiculous soundbites that don’t mean anything at all.
Why do people fall for this stuff over and over again? Microsoft have made billions by being nasty but now they’re going to start being nice because they are nice?
The old politicians’ maxim that “the less you intend to do about something, the more you need to talk about it”, applies here.
A thing is worth what you are willing or are forced to pay for it. Microsoft seems to value its own products very highly unless there is a hint of competition. Then it gives away as much as it has to to put someone out of business. What do they do when they can’t do that? They call in the lawyers. I wish they would just go ahead and drop the “S” bomb, so they can get laughed out of court. “Linux” infringes a Microsoft patent on how to construct a menu. That’s so stupid on so many levels. Only someone being paid by Microsoft would not understand how stupid it is. Nice article if for no other reason a lesson on how to make veiled threats in business speak.
Go Microsoft.